Thursday, May 27, 2010

Please try out the new data APRS export tool. There are no links to it from the web site yet. User account and login required. Feedback welcome, as usual!

It can export to KMZ (zip'ed KML + embedded symbol graphics in the same file, for Google Earth), CSV (opens up nicely in Excel, but seems to require some tricks in OpenOffice), JSON and XML (for the programmers out there).

This feature is aimed at people who wish to download their balloon's track afterwards, or their path to Dayton and back.

It's not aimed at people who wish to download the whole aprs.fi database, so it's rate limited quite heavily. Also, it's not an API. I'll probably set the limit to 3 downloads per day per user, although for the beta test, it's currently set to 10 downloads per day per user.

The info pages now have a little static map showing the station's position. I hope you like it this way. The static maps have also been upgraded to show proper APRS symbol graphics! For example: http://aprs.fi/info/SP3WBX-9

Some of the pages now have an "add this" button which allows you to easily share the page on your favourite social networks.

The raw packet display was fixed to be really, really binary clean. It used to choke on some high binary values.

Weather packets with an unrealistic high or low temperature are now ignored.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

This is old news, but anyway... I've just forgotten to upload the videos from my iphone.

On Sunday, 24th of April, I received CW and JT65B transmissions from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Reflected via the moon (EME, Earth-Moon-Earth). Using a very small directional antenna - a 10-element yagi, a scanner-type receiver (Icom IC-R2500) and a small but good preamplifier at the antenna.

To get a good view of the moon we drove to the side of a nearby field with OH2GEK. He even tried to get a two-way contact with the Arecibo station using his TS-2000 and a longer yagi.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Version 1.15 of Ham::APRS::FAP, the APRS packet parser module used by aprs.fi, was uploaded to CPAN yesterday evening. It should appear on mirrors today. This update contains all the changes implemented since November 2009.

Like most of you know by now, the parser is released in Open Source terms (GPL or Artistic license, like most of Perl) so that others can freely use it to implement APRS systems. I believe it is the most complete APRS decoder available as open source.